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On 02/14/2017 02:32 AM, Fred Maxwell [email protected] [EAC] wrote:
>> Sony’s decision to so tightly lock down the SACD format is a big
> part of why it failed commercially.
I think it's a solution in search of a problem. As you suggest, 16/44.1
is very good, so without a surround track, SACD doesn't offer much to
most people. Worse, when Sony first started issuing them, they put out a
ton of non-hybrid discs with no surround material, even in cases where
historical quadraphonic mixes were in the vaults. So the shelves were
full of expensive discs (often 1950s recordings!) that only worked in
expensive players and didn't /really/ offer more than their CD
counterparts. It wasn't until surround SACDs became more common that I
bought in.
Even in the surround world, Sony made some bizarre decisions. They had a
high-profile release of the Bob Dylan catalog in SACD a few years back.
They did 5.1 mixes of quite a few albums, including at least one where
that was a pretty pointless endevor. But Planet Waves, Nashville Skyline
and Desire, all three of which were 1970s quadraphonic releases, were
issued as stereo-only SACDs. Mind-boggling.
> The people who would be most enthusiastic about SACD are often
> the same ones who want to be able to rip audio from the discs
> they buy so that they can put them on home music servers,
> portable music players, and USB thumb drives for use in their cars.
I think that's very likely true now, but in Sony's defense (yes, I hate
myself for saying that!), SACD was, at its introduction, at least in
part a reaction to Napster and badly-extracted/encoded MP3s and crummy
portables and all the other junk on the legitimate and illegitimate
market at the time. My aging memory says there was a pretty significant
time lag between when Those Darn Kids started trading their MP3s and the
more serious listeners started using Squeezeboxes and other genuinely
good devices. In 2017 we're gotten to the point where at least one
“manufacturer” is shoving $80 worth of Raspberry Pi and HiFiBerry
hardware into a fancy metal box and selling it for $1,500 but I don't
think many were even dreaming of such a thing 15+ years ago.